The River

The River by Peter Heller
Fiction
2019 Halfred A. Knopf
Finished on January 2, 2020
Rating: 4.5/5 (Excellent)

Publisher's Blurb:

From the best-selling author of The Dog Stars, the story of two college friends on a wilderness canoe trip—a gripping novel of a friendship tested by fire, white water, and violence.

Wynn and Jack have been best friends since freshman orientation, bonded by their shared love of mountains, books, and fishing. Wynn is a gentle giant, a Vermont kid never happier than when his feet are in the water. Jack is more rugged, raised on a ranch in Colorado where sleeping under the stars and cooking on a fire came as naturally to him as breathing. When they decide to canoe the Maskwa River in northern Canada, they anticipate long days of leisurely paddling and picking blueberries, and nights of stargazing and reading paperback Westerns. But a wildfire making its way across the forest adds unexpected urgency to the journey. When they hear a man and woman arguing on the fog-shrouded riverbank and decide to warn them about the fire, their search for the pair turns up nothing and no one. But: The next day a man appears on the river, paddling alone. Is this the man they heard? And, if he is, where is the woman? From this charged beginning, master storyteller Peter Heller unspools a headlong, heart-pounding tale of desperate wilderness survival.

Wow! What a great way to start off the New Year (and new decade). Peter Heller's latest novel is outstanding! I've only read one other by him (The Dog Stars, reviewed here), but I love his beautiful prose and had a strong feeling that The River would also be a winner. I wasn't disappointed.

The cadence of the paddle strokes was high and it hurt after a couple of hours and so they weren't thinking about a lot. Jack had pored over the map and there would be a few riffles and smaller rapids and nothing to portage for two days, so he was at a loss as to where to expect the next attack. They had passed a wide cove with a pair of loons, one was probably nested nearby, and when they stroked past, the one closest tilted back her head and loosed a pitched wail that must have moved the trees like wind. It pierced the haze and echoed off the waiting forest and rolled over the water like any scream, and it seemed to carry a pathos so deep it was a wonder a mere world could support it. Maybe she knew what was coming. Maybe she had hatchlings in a nest and nowhere to go and she knew.

and

What he loved about poetry: it could do in a few seconds what a novel did in days. A painting could be like that, too, and a sculpture. But sometimes you wanted something to take days and days.

and 

"The biggest fires. They talk, just like this. Listen."

They listened. Who knew how far off. Not close enough yet to crown the wall of woods with light. There were other sounds: turbines and the sudden shear of a strafing plane, a thousand thumping hooves in cavalcade, the clamor and thud of shields clashing, the swell applause of multitudes drowned out as if by gusts of rain. Rain. Downpours. Washing through a valley and funneling over a pass. Crackling through woods and sodding over the tundra. Wynn closed his eyes and could swear he heard the sweep of a coming rainstorm. As if the fire in its fury could speak in tongues, could speak the language of every enemy. And sing, too. Over the rush, very faint, was a high-pitched thrum, a humming of air that rose and fell almost in melody.

Wynn walked to the water. He peered into the dark. Between the tall trees on either bank was a swatch of stars, a river of constellations that flowed heedless and unperturbed. Between the brightest, needling the arm of Orion and the head of the Bull, were distances of fainter stars that formed, as Wynn stared, a deep current, uninterrupted, as infused with bubbles of light as the aerated water of a rapid. Except that he could see into it and through it and it held fathomless dimensions that were as void of emotion as they were infinite. And if that river flowed, that firmament, it flowed with a majestic stillness. Nothing had ever been so still. Could spirit live there? In such a cold and silent purity of distance? Maybe it was silent at all. Maybe in the fires that consumed those stars were decibeled cyclones and trumpets and applause.

and

He heard a loon call, piercing and forlorn, and it poured into his spirit like cool water. It was a sad cry and he realized as he listened how barren the river had felt in the days without it. Why was a wail that seemed so lost and lonely so... what? Essential and lovely. It was like the blues, he guessed, or like Jack's cowboy songs. Sad, but somehow you would starve without them.

The story is extremely intense and each night I had to force myself to stop reading and go to sleep. The River is one of those books that makes me wish I was still a bookseller at Barnes and Noble. I would have enjoyed sharing my passion for the book, handselling it to customers looking for that perfect gift this past holiday season. I'm not a fisherman, or for that matter a firefighter, but I found myself thinking of several friends who either fish or fight fires (and a couple who do both) and know they would love this novel. I also thought of some who enjoy kayaking and thought of them as I raced through this book. And yet, this is not just a book about paddling a canoe or fly fishing. It's about the beauty of nature and a deep friendship, both of which are so vividly drawn that I felt as if I was sharing their canoe or camped out under the same stars they gazed upon. There is so much to admire about this moving, lyrical novel and I'm not only eager to read his other two (The Painter and Celine), but I look forward to rereading The Dog Stars.